“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.”
Now that Larry Ellison and Oracle have launched a $6.7 billion bid for BEA Systems, is Larry on the path to a weeping scene similar to Alexander once he buys up every enterprise software company in the known world? Armed with a big pile of cash, Ellison is well on his way to being the one who not only predicted the enterprise software (and in particular the application space) was due for a big rollup, but also the agent of fulfilling the prediction by doing the purchasing.
Despite some speculation that IBM or SAP may jump into the bidding war, I don’t think so. The BEA bid is a bid for software that occupies the middleware space where IBM already has a robust stack. SAP has its hands full right now with its bid for Business Objects.
Does Ellison’s ambitions have a weepy endpoint same as Alexander’s? Yes, for Alexander the known world ended somewhere in India. For Oracle the known world stops at the where the Redmond city limits begin.